On
August 15th, 1939, an English passenger plane from British Airways Ltd.
crashed in Danish waters between the towns of Nykøbing Falster and
Vordingborg. There were five casualties reported and one survivor. Just
two weeks before, Hitler invaded Poland.

With the world at the brink
of war, the manner in which this incident was investigated left much
open to doubt. The jurisdiction battle between the two towns and the
newly formed Danish secret police created an atmosphere of intrigue and
distrust.

The Bridge of Deaths is a love story and a mystery.
Fictional characters travel through the world of past life regressions
and information acquired from psychics as well as archives and
historical sources to solve "one of those mysteries that never get
solved." Based on true events and real people, The Bridge of Deaths is
the culmination of 18 years of sifting through conventional and
unconventional sources in Denmark, England, Mexico and the United
States. The story finds a way to help the reader feel that s/he is also
sifting through data and forming their own conclusions.

Cross The Bridge of Deaths into 1939, and dive into cold Danish waters to uncover the secrets of the G-AESY.

Get the revised 75th anniversary of The Bridge of Deaths on Amazon in ebook and paperback.

Guest Post

by M.C.V. Egan

Pondering on Peace and the Past

Pondering on peace after last year’s PEACE BLITZ in which around fifty bloggers from around the world wrote and posted their thoughts on peace, I came away with the distinct impression that peace can be a very personal and unique feeling or idea. The posts were as varied as can be and all of them were fascinating to me.

As I see it, peace can be described in a wide variety or ways: harmony, calm, freedom from disturbance, quiet, stillness and tranquility, to name just a few. Any of those words convey pleasant and very different images to us all.

However, the words that describe war all seem to convey if not the same image then surely the same feeling: conflict, combat, confrontation, hostilities.

Pondering on that made me worry and wonder if in great part peace is so elusive in some way because it is visualized in such a wide variety of ways. There are, after all, different types of pacifists: absolute, conditional, selective, and active.

I would love to imagine that I could someday be the absolute pacifist my character Maggie is in The Bridge of Deaths, opposed to war all war and violent conflict. The fact of the matter is that I was born in 1959 and war has been excused in one form or another for as long as I had any awareness of the term. As a young kid watching the Vietnam conflict on T.V. as if it was ‘just the news’ I believe synthesized an acceptance of the inevitability or even excuse of certain conflicts.

An absolute pacifist believes that it is never right to take part in war, even in self-defense. The value of human life is such that nothing can justify killing a person deliberately. As a parent, in self-defense or to protect my child, I cannot imagine I would not resort to any means—even violence.

I guess this might make me a conditional pacifist, which is embarrassing if not sort of convenient: A belief that one is against war and violence in principle, but that there may be circumstances when war will be less bad than the alternative.

I don’t think I am a selective pacifist and judge war by a matter of degree. I oppose violence and harm from small and large weapons. Apparently the selective pacifists only oppose wars involving weapons of mass destruction—nuclear or chemical and biological weapons—and it is unclear to me if this is because they see it as morally repugnant or as illogical because it is likely to have side effects far worse than whatever it could fix.

In a small way I am an active pacifist, but to really wear that label I feel the need to commit far more to the cause. Although some active pacifists have been known during war to take part in activities that seek to reduce the harm of war—such as driving ambulances or cooking for troops—some will refuse any involvement at all. I often heard of that growing up with stories of people who fled to Canada or Sweden to avoid the draft, and with great courage as a matter of principle and not one of fear.

But of course there are some “closet pacifists” afraid to act according to any beliefs or to refuse to fight. History has recorded many who have bravely chosen punishments or made their lives difficult rather than support wars or if drafted participate.

Nowadays, most democratic countries accept that people have the right of conscientious objection to military service, in some countries alternative forms of public service are available for objectors, but as we watch so much turmoil in the world today, I wonder how loud and powerful voices of peace would be if countries felt obliged to instill obligatory conscriptions.

The U.N. International Peace Day was first celebrated on September 21st 1982. At the time I was living in Sweden and working with small children. We taught them about peace and made white paper doves. At the same time the Catholic priest in my church was actively refusing to comply with the compulsory military service. He did so calling himself a pacifist and not a priest—he eventually left the priesthood but I can only imagine he has never left his pacifist views.

So I guess digging deep into my mind’s eye when I tailored the character Maggie as an absolute pacifist I did so with that man in mind. The only absolute pacifist I have ever met.

About the author

M.C.V. Egan is the pen name chosen by Maria Catalina Vergara Egan. Catalina was born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1959, the sixth of eight children, in a traditional Catholic family.

From a very young age, she became obsessed with the story of her maternal grandfather, Cesar Agustin Castillo--mostly the story of how he died.

She spent her childhood in Mexico. When her father became an employee of The World Bank in Washington D.C. in the early 1970s, she moved with her entire family to the United States. Catalina was already fluent in English, as she had spent one school year in the town of Pineville, Louisiana with her grandparents. There she won the English award, despite being the only one who had English as a second language in her class.

In the D.C. suburbs she attended various private Catholic schools and graduated from Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland in 1977. She attended Montgomery Community College, where she changed majors every semester. She also studied in Lyons, France, at the Catholic University for two years. In 1981, due to an impulsive young marriage to a Viking (the Swedish kind, not the football player kind), Catalina moved to Sweden where she resided for five years and taught at a language school for Swedish, Danish, and Finnish businesspeople. She then returned to the USA, where she has lived ever since. She is fluent in Spanish, English, French and Swedish.

Maria Catalina Vergara Egan is married and has one son who, together with their five-pound Chihuahua, makes her feel like a full-time mother. Although she would not call herself an astrologer she has taken many classes and taught a few beginner classes in the subject.

She celebrated her 52nd birthday on July 2nd, 2011, and gave herself self-publishing The Bridge of Deaths as a gift.